Important child education tip: don’t make your kids clean toilets. It may be illegal in New Zealand!

In the Stuff.co.nz today:

Boy made to clean toilet as punishment

A five-year-old boy was made to clean toilets by a caregiver as punishment at a Child, Youth and Family-funded after-school care programme in Rotorua.

Now his mother is seeking legal advice on the punishment – dished out after the boy supposedly hit a girl in the face with a ball.

Oriwa Pehi-Livapulu said her son Noble could have become sick after the incident at the Chipmunks Centre last week.

He was only five and did not even clean the toilet at home, she said.

“My mana has been taken away from me. Noble’s spirit has been trampled on”, she told The New Zealand Herald.

She has complained to CYF, which funded the programme.

While I won’t be going around forcing kids to clean toilet, what the mother said was quite a jewel :)

No, seriously, in my childhood days having a 2-week period of twice-a-day cleaning the school toilet was a normal punishment for bad “school crimes”. Yes we did it, we were little kids with little hands on our big toilet brushes and mops, and we grew up healthy and well-behaved. I’ve never been an interest of CYF, I’ve never been sick from cleaning toilet, and I am now working successfully, owns a house of my own, a car, and a $25k motorcycle.

On the other hand, if the toilets had not been cleaned I might have contracted swine flu long time ago and dead by now.

Added 17/06/2009:

If this Stuff article is a barometer on New Zealand parental attitude, we really have to be worried.